Short stories

After four weeks of dealing with shingles, I am now, finally, out of the woods. I have very faint symptoms but I’m going for brisk walks and trying to carefully ease back into a more active lifestyle.

During my convalescence, I finished a collection of 20 of the “Best American Short Stores” from 2014. One of the things I enjoyed was the opening essay by the collection’s curator on what her metrics were for the “best.” Jennifer Egan, author of “A Visit from the Good Squad,” wrote:
“To me, fiction writing at any length, in any form, is a feat of radical compression: take the sprawling chaos of human experience, run it though the sieve of perception, and distill it into something comparatively minuscule that somehow, miraculously, illuminates the vast complexity around it.”

Well put, Jennifer. Even though I’ve been a writer my entire professional life, I don’t think I could actually be a writer. When I started this blog, I’d say I made an effort to write well, to convey an interesting array of impressions and experiences. I’m afraid it has regressed into a very boring list of “what I did today.” Apologies, dear reader. There may be the occasional interesting experience or lovely photo, but it more reflects a life of trying to get things done--working for Preventable Surprises, volunteer work, housework, partaking of cultural offerings. Also, I tend to catch up a week or more after the fact, so I really don’t remember any interesting ideas or experiences I had last week, although there could have been something, or many things, miniscule but miraculous.

One more bit from Egan. She comments that during the first 18 years of her life (she’s my age), there were three “telephonic possibilities: a busy signal, or a person picking up, or endless ringing.” This is the part I totally agreed with: “As a parent, journalist, music fan, and believer in copyright, I find my responses to our warp-speed technological change falling mainly on a spectrum from anxiety to terror.” Amen sister.
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